Stefan Molyneux opens the discussion by reflecting on a recent debate between Constantine and Andrew Wilson, where he examines differing perspectives on women's connection to motherhood and men's duties regarding military drafts. He stresses the need to view these issues within a wider context, noting that the assigned roles for both women and men often fail to capture the real emotional and economic aspects of parenting and work.
He challenges the common view that motherhood represents an overwhelming burden. Rather than seeing the economic setbacks tied to childbirth and raising children as impossible to overcome, he points out that the work of stay-at-home mothers tends to be overlooked in public conversation. Women's contributions, he observes, are frequently supported by partners or public assistance, and this leads him to question standard ideas about economic equality and what motherhood actually involves.
Throughout the talk he draws on personal stories from his own life and from people he knows, along with exchanges with callers, to illustrate how societal expectations shape the way both women and men approach family life and how children come to see their parents' roles. These accounts highlight the shifting realities in households where both partners often pursue jobs outside the home.
He also looks back at historical patterns of household work, comparing the daily demands faced by women today with those of earlier generations who managed child-rearing without modern appliances or conveniences. Technology has eased many domestic tasks, he notes, yet the sense that motherhood is burdensome has grown stronger, which can cloud the genuine satisfactions of raising children.
At the heart of his points is the effect these attitudes may have on the next generation. He suggests that framing parenting as constantly stressful risks planting resentment in children toward their future family responsibilities. In closing he urges listeners to push back against cultural stories that diminish the value of parenting and to keep talking openly about both its challenges and its rewards, so that new parents can approach their roles with clearer eyes.
The conversation then turns to education, where he criticizes compulsory state schooling for its tendency to prioritize obedience over genuine curiosity and creativity. He makes the case for allowing children to follow their own interests instead of being forced into a rigid system that stifles independent thought.
By the end he encourages listeners to think more deeply about parenting, the changing nature of gender roles, and the value of building strong personal and family bonds rather than conforming to outside pressures. He offers a grounded way to understand these matters and to handle the practical realities of family life today.
0:00:00 - Welcome to your Sunday morning philosophy takedown
0:01:24 - Debating the Draft vs. Motherhood
0:06:40 - Understanding Gender Roles in Society
0:12:06 - The Burden of Child Rearing
0:16:21 - Women’s Work Through History
0:22:21 - Comparing Past and Present Labor
0:29:04 - The Economics of Parenthood
0:32:48 - Emotional Manipulation in Parenting
0:38:57 - The Rewards of Parenting
0:42:02 - The Nature of Complaining
1:00:31 - Education Without Coercion
1:05:03 - The Importance of Teaching Skills
1:14:51 - Supporting the Show
[0:00:00] Good morning, friends. I hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:00:05] Welcome to your Sunday morning philosophy takedown of the forces of anti-reason.
[0:00:11] And I started my day off. Constantine, someone or other, was debating. Andrew Wilson, husband of Rachel Wilson, who has actually a great book on the occult origins of feminism, which you should check out. And Andrew and Rachel show up on the whatever podcast and other areas. And they were debating the draft versus motherhood. The draft versus motherhood. And we'll put a link to the debate below. It was shockingly bad. Okay, Andrew Wilson is a very smart guy and a very good debater. He has that slightly drunken uncle, weary impatience with frivolity and foolishness that is actually quite powerful. And I don't mean that to diminish his rhetorical skills, which are very good, but he has this, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Okay. I understand. Yeah, yeah, I got it. Got it. And it's very, very effective. And I certainly applaud that.
[0:01:19] But debating is in part show and in part reason. And of course, the reason should outshine the show, but you need to have, it doesn't, if you have a great product, you also need a great salesman. In fact, the better the product, the more of a great salesman you need. And the argument was something like this.
[0:01:38] So, Constantine was saying women have to carry children and raise children. And that is the unique contribution that they provide to society. And Andrew Wilson's argument was that men are subject to the draft. And the draft is compelled and often deadly. And there are worse things that can happen to you in war than to die. Some people go through so much war trauma that they end up committing suicide years later, which is a fate worse than death in some ways. And the argument was interesting because it comes down to compelled versus non-compelled. The draft, you know, that, as Andrew pointed out, they're drafting men in Ukraine at the age of 60. I could be drafted if I was in Ukraine. Although not if I say it that way, I could be drafted. Maybe I could be drafted. Duke Duke voice, I could be drafted.
[0:02:47] And the compelled nature of it is interesting. And the equivalence was made, Constantine was saying, but women have this great burden of having and raising children, which economically disadvantages them, right? Because they have to take time off from work in order to raise children. And that is a negative. And that, of course, bypasses the fact that when women take time off from work, almost always somebody else pays the bills. The husband, the government, obviously, in a very big way through $100,000 worth of welfare for the average single mother of two children, welfare and other benefits. And so, you have to take the entirety of a woman's income. You don't just look at her salaried income and say, that's her income. That's crazy. I mean, That's just completely deranged because then all women without jobs would have to be living under bridges or in tent cities or something like that. And, you know, it's just a while to me. It's wild to me that people get lost in all of these abstract arguments and don't just do the basic work of, oh, I don't know, looking around society.
[0:04:01] If women are so underpaid, and if a woman's economic consumption is only, only determined, by her salaried income, then why are women, you know, a third of women stay home with their kids or more, why are women not living under bridges if they don't have an income? It's because if a woman is raising children, somebody else is paying her income. Again, it could be the taxpayers. It could be usually the husband or someone. It could be savings and things like that. It could be the parents, her parents could be paying it and so on. But it's just this funny thing where people don't, they get lost in all this data and they don't just actually look at the world as it is. And Constantine, I mean, midwit personified, I mean, midwit personified, because the argument that men are subject to the draft and that's their special obligation was countered. And I wouldn't have counted it this way, but whatever. I mean, everybody has their different style.
[0:05:07] It's countered by saying men have the special obligation to go to war if they're drafted. Women have a special obligation to have children. And Andrew Wilson was pointing out, of course, that women aren't having children. I mean, Now, this is kind of a good faith debate thing. This is how you know whether you're debating someone because you're both in hot pursuit of the truth or because you're just trying to score points and win something, right? So...
[0:05:40] There's a shorthand or a shortcut to language, right? Which is when you say, but women aren't having children. What does that mean? That means that as a whole, a society is significantly below the replacement rate, in particular for, let's say, the historical population, right? So women aren't having children as part of the culture. Now, if you import a bunch of people from some other country and they have a bunch of kids, that's raising the birth rate, of course, right? But we were talking about sort of the historical or culturally contiguous part of the society. So, you know, that meme where the guy is standing in the, looks like the piazza, holding a cup of coffee, and he says to a woman, the average height of women is 5'4". And the woman says, I'm 5'6", though. And the man just takes a weary sip of the cup of coffee.
[0:06:41] And men deal with abstractions, women deal with particulars. This is not an IQ thing. Women are brilliant in many ways, but that is the generality. This is why men tend to work with abstract things, principles, engineering, and so on. And women prefer working with people because men deal with concepts and women deal with instances. And both, of course, are absolutely essential. You need to have a fence around your house to keep the wolves out, but you need to deal with children as individuals in order to raise them. So both are essential.
[0:07:15] So Andrew Wilson says, but women aren't having children. To which Constantine responds, but my wife is having children and your wife had children. And it's like, that is such a bad faith argument and that that's so feminized. And listen, I don't mean feminized in any negative way whatsoever. Feminized is beautiful. For women, it's just not so great for actual men. And what do you even say to that? That's just such a pathetically bad faith argument. Women as a whole, like as a whole is implied, right? And of course, it's an insult to everyone involved. If you say women aren't having children, and then you point out two instances out of hundreds of millions of women across the West, or, you know, in South Korea and Japan and so on. If you say, women aren't having children, and you say, I know two women who are having children. And of course, that is implied like above the replacement rate. It's such a pathetic response that what is implied, I try not to have these things in debates, and you'll see me pushing back when I'm debating with listeners, and I see we've got some callers, so I'll get you in a second. I appreciate your patience.
[0:08:42] But if someone was so dumb as to hear the statement, women aren't having children, and then think that the most brilliant rebuttal is to point out that he knows of a woman who is having children, it would be to say that Andrew Wilson is making the argument that absolutely zero women are having children, despite the fact that he's married to Rachel Wilson, who has had a bunch of kids. I mean, what do you even say to that? It drags the conversation down to a level south of IQ 80. And I actually get very impatient and angry at people who deliberately dumb down debate in order to score a non-existent point. Be like saying, LeBron James is not actually a very good basketball player because he misses some shots.
[0:09:41] Or if they're two sports announcers, LeBron James takes the shot, he misses. And the other one says, oh, are you saying he misses all his shots?
[0:09:52] What do you even say? Oh, what do you even say? It's so pathetic. And then you waste time, right? This is pure sophistry on Constantine's part. Now, the idea, the very idea, and this has been a brilliant psyop, And this is not female nature. I wouldn't say that it's female nature. But it's more common among women to inflate their contributions to attempt to provide equal value. So I had a friend once many years ago who convinced his girlfriend to move from some distant place. I remember having dealing with them a couple of months after this happened. So he convinced his girlfriend, who he had a long-distance relationship with, he convinced his girlfriend to come and move in with him. And for months and months, she never got a job. Didn't even look for a job. They weren't having kids, at least at this point in their lives. They were just, you know, playing house, living together in that foolish way that a lot of people in their 20s do. I say this with all due humility, but I remember them having this conversation. You know when couples have this buried barb resentment and that you're sitting with them and you can feel these icebergs moving deep below the conversation, but only the tips are pointing out.
[0:11:16] And the evening was drawing to a close and he said, I got to close things up. I have to get it for work in the morning. I mean, my girlfriend doesn't, but I do, right? And she's like, oh, what do you mean I don't? And so they had this conversation. And she clearly didn't want to get a job, which is fine. I mean, jobs in your 20s generally suck because you don't actually get to more skilled jobs and better managers until you get older. This is one of the reasons why people become socialists is they have bad bosses when they're in their teenagers, because if you're a good and competent boss, you're not managing teenagers, right?
[0:11:56] So she didn't want to get a job. Now, could she say, I don't want to get a job? I'm not going to get a job. I just want you to pay all the bills. She couldn't say that.
[0:12:06] Because then, clearly, he would be paying for sex, which is gross, right? Men should not pay for sex. The excess resources that men are able to create and provide have been evolved to take care of a wife and children, to pay for a wife and children. So, she couldn't say, well, I just don't want to get a job. I mean, it's not fun. I'd rather you pay all the bills. Because then the question is, okay, so why would I be paying all the bills? What's the big differentiator? If she was just some male roommate, he wouldn't be paying all the bills, so the male roommate could stay home, suck on bonbons, and watch some Hispanic soap operas or whatever she was doing during the day. So, the only difference would be that he's paying because she's having sex with it. And that's gross. Men don't want to pay for sex if they have even a shred of self-esteem. You pay if you're a man, your wife is home raising kids, you pay for the wife and kids. You don't pay for sex. That's gross. I mean, that is prostitution. It's live-in prostitution if the only reason you're paying the woman's bills is because she's having sex with you rather than you're on your way to, like, you're married and you're planning for kids and so on. That's fine. And she's nesting. That's beautiful. So she couldn't just say to my friend, I don't want to get a job. I just want you to pay the bills. When we have no plans, at least in the short run, they had no plans for marriage or they were just playing house.
[0:13:33] So she couldn't say that because then he'd say, well, I don't want to pay all the bills because, you know, then I'm paying a lot extra to have you here just in return for having sex. So that was not so she had to what did she have to do she had to create an obligation on his part that he was responsible for that wasn't just sex so what did she say i remember this evening like it was yesterday because it really illuminated a lot for me she said she said look you have to pay the bills because i moved all the way here to be with you i gave up my whole life in this other place to come here and live with you, So you have to pay the bills until I get a job. And it's taking me a while to get settled. And there's still things that I need to do. And I'm still getting used to the neighborhood and figuring out what the bus routes are, like all the stuff. But I gave up my whole life to come here and be with you. The least you could do is cover the bills for a little while, right? So she created a labor, an obligation, a hole that he just had to fill in for her. I gave up my whole life. I moved all the way here just to be with you, and you can't just cover rent for a couple of... Right?
[0:14:50] Brilliant. Honestly brilliant. I mean, not honest. Not honest. I mean, if I had been in the man's shoes, I would have said, nope, that's not what we talked about ahead. I mean, if you talked about it ahead of time and said, I want at least four to six months of you covering the bills for me to come and move in with you, then we could have had that discussion.
[0:15:13] But you can't come here. You know, you had a job where you were. You can't just come here and not work and say, well, you owe me because that's something you need to negotiate ahead of time. So do you think I had the assumption that you would get a job relatively quickly after you came to move in with me? Well, sure. So you can't change the deal later on, right? I mean, that would be my approach, but he was a little cucked as men are. So this ability, it doesn't just happen for women. It happens for men in the workplace. You know, the famous movie Office Space where people have to justify their jobs. They just make up all of this amazing, intense, wonderful stuff that they're doing, and they hope to keep their job. So they just make up value in order to extract a paycheck. While I'm involved in strategizing for the entire product line, forward thrust in the marketing arena to raise awareness of our solutions among the relevant sectors of the demographic. Again, just make up a bunch of nonsense, all of which is unmeasurable and just sounds impressive.
[0:16:22] Public sector workers do this all the time, and people do it with their business cards, you know, those big fold-out business cards where they just claim to be the masters of the universe, master of time, space, and dimension. They don't want to go to Paris. and women do this again not all some and they exaggerate how difficult.
[0:16:43] Their jobs are. They exaggerate how difficult their lives are in order to extract resources. I moved here, quivering lips. I gave up my life. I moved here just to be with you. So, I mean, this is the root of women feeling overwhelmed. Feel overwhelmed. Why do they feel overwhelmed? Because if they're straining every fiber of their being to do things for those around them, then that creates an implicit and sometimes explicit obligation.
[0:17:17] So, some men, some women, maybe a bit more women, exaggerate their contributions in order to extract resources. They exaggerate their contributions in order to extract resources. And it's a tragically common phenomenon. And if you look at, I remember many years ago, reading a book on the Canadian welfare state, I actually had sent out prospectus to publishers to write a book on the Canadian welfare state, because I found it quite fascinating. Of course, I got no interest because I didn't realize that it's mostly communist running the publishing industry. That took me a while to figure that one out. Freedomain.com/books. You should check out the books. They're free. They're great. Tony the Tiger style. But I remember this guy who wrote a book on the Canadian welfare state that was very sympathetic. And he was talking about how he would wake up as a kid. He was an old guy. So this is, I guess, turn of the century, last century, early 1900s. He said that he would wake up at night and his mother would be sobbing as she did the laundry. You know, what do they call them? Washboard abs. Washboard abs because you would scrub your child's clothes, your children's clothes, your family's clothes on this washboard. Her clothes are old, but never are they dirty. And his mother would be crying because she'd be having to do the laundry in the middle of the night. She was so tired and all of this, that and the other, right?
[0:18:45] Now, of course, if you look at a modern woman's child raising, on average, right? On average, what happens? Well, they've got to get up in the morning and they've got to make their kids some food, but usually it's not a full cooked breakfast, and some toast, some Pop-Tarts, you know, that kind of crap. Well, toast isn't crap, but Pop-Tarts certainly are. She gets up, she makes the kids some food, packs her lunch, maybe, and then puts them on the bus. And, you know, eight o'clock, 7.30, eight o'clock, they're on the bus. And she's a stay-at-home, right? So what does she do? Well, she's got a dishwasher. She's got a vacuum cleaner. I still remember in my neighborhood growing up, this is before vacuum cleaners were common. I remember a guy coming to sell us a vacuum cleaner in an apartment. Oh, it cleans the carpets. And I remember he was like, oh, go and talk to your mother, make her buy it in a real.
[0:19:39] Cheese bag sleazeball of a salesman. And I remember when I was a kid, women would take their carpets out and hang them on their clotheslines and beat the dust out of them. That's what you had to do. No, don't have to do that anymore. You got fridges, you got clean running water, you got air conditioning and heating in the winter. You don't have to go to the well, you don't have to boil the water, you don't have to build the fire, you don't have to get the firewood. When I was a kid, we used to get the milk delivered every morning. The milkman Sting's father was a milkman. Sting used to go with his father to deliver the milk in the wee hours. Oh, it was great stuff too, man. You could do a little prick on the top of that foil and you could suck the cream off the top. Oh, so good. And so, yeah, your milk would be delivered and compare it to the Middle Ages. You've got flushing toilets. So you don't have to deal with an outhouse. You don't have to deal with any of that stuff. What did they always do in Dungeons and dragons, there'd be some place in the castle with a river running underneath, like an underground river, and you'd poop in a hole there in the water. We'd take it all the way, Ganges-style.
[0:20:49] And her kids are gone until, like, from 7.30 or 8 in the morning until 4 o'clock. Depends if they have after-school activities, but they're gone for most of the day. So she's not really raising her children that way, right? And then when the kids come home, they've got homework for half an hour, hour, hour and a half. Could be two hours. They've got to study for things. They've got all that kind of stuff. So she's not really doing much raising of the kids. she's not doing a whole lot of housework compared to what needed to be done in the past. I mean, the fact that she has washers and dryers, washers and dryers, amazing ones, they give her a ping on the phone when they're done, washers and dryers. I mean, women who are trying to oversell their sacrifice and service will talk about, well, they do the laundry and it's like, come on, man, you throw stuff in, you push a button and you have to fold it or you often will fold it. But you have to compare women's labor in the present with women's labor in the past, and it's night and day.
[0:21:52] I mean, men are still working, you know, hour commute, eight hours a day, 10 hours, right? Men are still working 10 hours a day. And the jobs have become easier. I get that. The jobs have become easier. But men are still working 10 hours a day. Women, with all the labor saving devices, women used to have to do, you know, 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day of just keeping everyone alive. No running water, no push button fireplaces, no air conditioning.
[0:22:21] No laundry, no vacuum cleaners. I mean, the fight against dust and dust brings mites, the fight against rats, rats bring disease, mice. I mean, it was a constant battle, constant battle and women's work has shrunk and it's a funny thing the more women's work shrinks the more on average women complain right there was a theory back in the day that women would say well.
[0:22:49] One of the reasons we're not having kids is because men aren't doing enough housework. And if men did more housework, we'd be able to have more kids. And that turned out to be a lie. I mean, men's share of the housework since the 80s and 90s has gone up two to three times. Men are doing much more child raising. Men are doing much more housework. And the birth rate has gone down. So that wasn't a thing. But it's often the case that as the workload goes down, the complaints about work go up.
[0:23:22] And I've often thought of, it would be a fun short story to have a feminist or a woman complaining about her big housework day to awake as a washerwoman in the 14th century and see what that day was like. And she would come back and kiss modernity and kiss the appliances and kiss the rumba and all that kind of stuff. Kiss the washing machines.
[0:23:48] I mean, just not having dangerous bacteria and virus-laden dirt everywhere around. I mean, women had to beat the carpets because the carpets would get mites or ticks or they would go on the kids and it would be hell. You know, one day in the Middle Ages has you truly love everything about modernity. I say this when I go to the dentist every day. Does that hurt? I'm like, nope, you're just scraping. And no, honestly, I love dentists. you guys do what you need to do, because in the past, they would have had to, you know, like I had an ankylose tooth, which is a tooth that was fused with the bone from when I was a kid, I had to have it removed, and in the past, they would have had to try and rip it out of my jaw, break it, no anesthetic, I mean, it probably would have killed me. So, modern medicine, God love you guys, modern dentistry, God love you all. Go read Angela's Ashes, the novel, Angela's ashes to figure all that stuff out so some women again lazy people as a whole will.
[0:24:52] Always exaggerate the demands upon them it's just too much I'm just overwhelmed they're just this no it's just women are very robust women hauled us through a million years of brutal evolution with half their children dying before the age of five and work from morning until night and they did it, and I had aunts like this when I was a kid, they did it with who, I mean, we lived in there, or they lived and I lived there sometimes, in country cottages in Ireland.
[0:25:22] And it was a huge amount of work. Most of the modern amenities had not reached these country cottages. I also remember when a friend of mine had a cottage when I was a teenager. I posted some pictures of me chopping wood up there. And the cottage, I mean, it was rough. No toilets, no air conditioning. Heating was a fireplace. We all slept on the floor by the fire. I think there was running water, but that was about it. And the amount of work it took to maintain that cottage. I mean, I loved it. I always loved physical labor. I absolutely love physical labor. When I was in Africa, I would take the machetes and cut the way through the bush when I was out with my father doing his prospecting and mapping and so on that he was doing as a geologist. I love manual labor. I love digging. I love hacking things. I love chopping wood. It's just great. So I loved going up there and doing the manual labor. But half the day was manual labor and half the day was play. But for women, it was constant. I mean, the women up there, they had to make all these burgers and these salads and potato salads. And then they had to clean and wash and they had to take the carpets out to beat them. And, you know, this was in the 80s, early 80s. I mean, it's the backwoods of Canada. So it's sort of a different planet as far as that goes.
[0:26:43] So, yeah, it was a lot of work. Now, it's pretty easy. It's pretty easy. Life in the modern world is easy. And there's something funny about the birth rate goes down when life is less harsh. And this is for obvious biological reasons. When life is really harsh, a lot of your kids are going to die. So you have the urge to have a lot of kids. When life is easy, K-selected organisms generally slow their reproduction or nature slows their reproduction. Stress breeds a very high sex drive, and ease lowers, I mean, you could say lowers your sex drive, certainly lowers your reproductive drive.
[0:27:22] So one of the biggest psyops in the world has been, as life has gotten easier and easier and easier for women, to the point where, again, you take some woman's great-great-grandmother, take her forward to the average day, and they'd be like, it's magical. It's a miracle. They'd been transported into the world of the Jetsons. What, you just, you have a freezer? You have a fridge? You have a robot that cleans your carpets? You just push a button and cool air comes out. Are you insane that you should? Oh, this is unbelievable. This is a dish washer. I can't tell you the amount of fights my brother and I had is whose turn it was to do the dishes of growing up. And I always remember I used to have this business idea when I was a kid, like, because it wasn't too bad doing the plates, but all the endless cutlery was a real drag. And I thought, well, what, you know, what if you could just make a dishwasher just for cutlery, just for people in apartments? Be pretty nice. But yeah, just, just look around. just look around. You've got food that you can store pretty much forever.
[0:28:21] And you can get food delivered at any time. That wasn't a thing when I was a kid. And they'd say, you live in paradise. You can keep in touch with distant relatives, not with letters that take a month, but with instant video calls pretty much for free. It's incredible. And the women from the past who zipped forward through time to the present But look at their great-great-great-granddaughters claiming to be overwhelmed and stressed and burdened. And you'd be like, okay, let's switch. Let's do a wife swap through time. And the overburdened women would probably be happier in the past. If you have time to complain, you have too much time.
[0:29:05] So what women have done, of course, if they've said, because they want political participation, they want the vote, they want all of this, they want welfare, they want, you know, the welfare state is just a way of stripping money from men, and in particular responsible men, and giving it to irresponsible men and mostly women. And so they want to vote, and they want a bunch of government spending on them, and they don't want to be drafted, of course. So what do they say? Well, they have to say that their lives are these big, massive burdens, that raising children is this big, giant, massive burden, and they're owed everything because, they sacrifice so much, and they work so hard, and they're so overwhelmed, right? Gimme, gimme, gimme. There's lots of ways to extract resources from people. The tremble-voiced, on-the-edge shakedown is one of the most effective. It doesn't work for men. You know, go to your boss, if you're a man on a construction site, go to your boss with a quivering voice and say, I feel overwhelmed by me. They just laugh at you. Get back to work or get lost. And of course, a man doesn't get to refuse the draft by saying he's just overwhelmed.
[0:30:23] And it's a good shake there. Now, it comes at a huge cost. So women have to portray raising children as a big giant burden that's somehow equivalent to getting your face blown off by some Iranian-made draft in Ukraine. They'd have to say that raising children is like going to war. Oh my God, that is wild. Especially in the modern world, where there's not a whole lot of child raising going on. There's school, there's iPads, there's friends, there's videos, there's Chuck E. Cheese, there's arcades, there's like...
[0:30:56] I mean, there's not a whole lot of child raising going on. I mean, I've asked hundreds of people over the last 21 years and hundreds of thousands online, what are the big moral lessons that your parents gave you that you still find a value to this day or any life lessons and nobody's got a thing? Nothing. I mean, it's really not much child raising going on at the moment. Your child's being raised by the internet, which is why women who won't raise their children freak out about misogynistic podcasts. Nah, podcasts are the rebels and the mainstream media is the empire. Pew pew. Well, if you don't raise your kids, someone's going to have to raise them. You know, I just don't feed my children and then I'm concerned that they're getting food from strangers. Well, they got to eat, right? Kids got to be raised somehow. If you're not raising them, they'll turn online. Someone got to get their food from somewhere, right? Can't starve to death. So women have psyoped society into believing that raising children is this big, giant burden for which they deserve every consideration, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in free stuff, exclusion from the draft because we're raising children.
[0:32:09] And they get all this free stuff because men are emotionally driven to give resources to women who are on the edge. Because if women are on the edge, they might run away and you have no one to raise your children. They might kill the children. They might make your life hell and destroy your capacity to work and make an income because a man out there battling in the world surely does not want to come home with some bipolar disorder battling woman. Then taking a long walk off a short cliff becomes pretty tempting. So appeasing women who are on the edge is kind of baked into men's DNA. It's a very powerful weapon.
[0:32:48] And it's an unfair weapon in general. I mean, unless you are in the 12th century with 12 children. And even then, there's not a lot of complaints from women or men. All life sucked throughout history. Compared to modern standards, all life sucked throughout human history for everyone, even the wealthy. Well, perhaps even especially the wealthy because they were drafted for wars at a higher rate than the average, as my ancestors knew, in Ireland.
[0:33:16] So women have cranked up how difficult it is. Now, I've been a stay-at-home dad. My daughter's going to be 18 this year. So I've been a stay-at-home dad for over 17 years. And people say, ah, yes, well, you only have one child. It's like, well, that's true. But in some ways, that's more of a challenge because your child only has you to play with. I'm not complaining about that. It's been a blast, but it's just kind of a fact. But raising children is a blast. Raising children is really enjoyable. Raising children is just about the greatest experience in life. It really is. And I mean, you've heard this sometimes on shows where my daughter has done a show with me sometimes. I mean, at least a couple of times a week, we're laughing so hard that the milk comes out our nose. Compare that to being drafted. It's insane. And I have homeschooled and I've been at home. So it's a lot of time. And I did work in a daycare for years when I was younger and took kids all over the place. Myself and one other teacher would take 25 to 30 kids all over the place in the summers.
[0:34:25] The kids were aged five to 10 and it was a blast. It was a blast. So the idea that raising children is somehow equivalent to being forced into war, is so far beyond comprehension for anybody with any ounce of sense that it truly staggers the imagination that people would even remotely make this claim. Amazing. And what happens, of course, is that women do get a bunch of stuff because they're overwhelmed and it's so hard and you don't know and rub their temples and, oh, it was really difficult here. And they get concessions because they're on the edge. It's a form of soft emotional terrorism, in my view.
[0:35:11] And so they get a bunch of resources. The problem is, though, that by constantly broadcasting out into the world how difficult, unpleasant, overwhelming, isolating, problematic, conflict-ridden, the parenting is, they're constantly spraying out to the world and to the next generation, and to the next generation, to their kids, that parenting sucks. I mean, come on. It just takes a moment. If parenting sucked, how could we have survived as a species? Say, ah, yes, well, there was no birth control. Yeah, but killing kids was pretty easy in the past. We couldn't have survived.
[0:35:50] If we had not evolved to enjoy parenting, we could not have survived as a species. We could not, even if the parenting enjoyment is simply biochemically programmed in the way that it is, say, with birds. But yeah, all the oxytocin and the happiness and the closeness and the, I mean, in nature, fathers will fight to the death to protect their families. They enjoy sex, of course. They enjoy the companionship. They enjoy play fighting with their kids and all of that. and there's great affection. You can see in animals, particularly, of course, as I mentioned, the K-selected animals, the predators, because they have to bond with and train their children on how to be a predator because being a predator is a whole lot more cognitively challenging than being prey. So, of course, we evolved to enjoy parenting. We could not have evolved in any other way, but we also evolved to whine and complain in order to get additional resources because this is a dual strategy for women, right? Positive incentives, negative incentives, rewards and punishments. The woman encourages the man, supports the man, and he goes out into the world with that support and that encouragement, conquers more, gets more, gets more resources. She's thrilled and happy, praises him, and she gets more resources that way. Of course, the other way that she gets resources is to nag and complain and bitch and moan until he's just like, oh, fine, just take it. And then she smugly smiles and gets her resources. It's a pretty sad strategy, but it certainly is viable.
[0:37:19] So women have been getting resources by complaining about parenting and complaining about running a household and complaining about being home and complaining about it cost me money, right? Yeah. Yeah. Try raising your kids in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. That's what it's like to be without money. Raising kids with a husband who pays the bills or the government that pays the bills with all modern conveniences that can be imagined.
[0:37:47] Is not even in the same category. And so, yeah, so some complainy women, again, this is far from all women, but some complainy women have gotten a bunch of resources by exaggerating how, what a burden it is to be pregnant, to raise children, to have children. Oh, it's so difficult. And they get resources, but it kills the birth rate because the children grow up feeling like a burden and they grow up with the impression, well, more than an impression, they grow up with the empirical fat coming from their parents, and in particular from their mothers, that parenting is a burden. The parenting is negative, the kids are hassle, right? There was a study that came out where it was like, you know, babies take somewhere between 300 and 400 hours of sleep from their parents in the first year. Yeah, that's true. But also, the time that you spend chatting with and playing with your baby in the wee hours is some of my favorite memories in life. Some of my favorite memories in life.
[0:38:51] Chatting with my daughter when she was very young, just learning language, standing by the window. It was a beautiful cloudless night. Full moon was out.
[0:39:01] I look at the moon. I look at her eyes. I see the little tiny pinprick of silver light in her eyes as the moon is reflected off her eyeball. And she says, moon, and points. I said, beautiful memory that the word moon formed in her mind at the same time as I could see as it looked deep into her brain and see the tiny pinprick of moon. On her mind, she got the word moon and said it. Ah, the quiet times at night when you're chatting and playing with a baby in the wee hours. Beautiful. I mean, yeah, you're tired the next day. So what? I mean, you got the rest of eternity to rest after you're dead. It's such a burden. Overwhelmed.
[0:39:45] The other thing, of course, is that the overwhelm thing generally becomes even more of a problem because if your mother is stressed and overwhelmed, then it's more likely that you did not get good resources as a child. You didn't get warmth and comfort and connection and closeness and happiness and love. So then your emotions are stripped bare and stressed and all of that. So it then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that if your mother feels that you're some big giant burden that she complains about in order to extract more resources from men, either directly or through the state, then you grow up feeling like a burden. And then when you become a mother, if you become a mother, you feel that children are a burden, you're stressed. So it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[0:40:33] Parenting, art, philosophy, and love are the four corners of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I would trade them for nothing. I gave up writing books for over 10 years. Could have written 20 more books. I was writing two books a year. Why do I care about 20 books? I'm not a human being.
[0:40:49] I'm happy. I'm healthy. I'm a human being. Two out of three ain't bad. So yeah, pretty sad state of debate. Now also, last thing I'll say, and then I'll get to the callers. Thank you for your patience. I mean, we know, we know that parenting is way better than going to war. How do we know that? Because, because, because when women are about to be sent to the front, they just get pregnant. I mean, we know this empirically. It's not complicated. Just look at what people do. The idea that you would compare parenting to being bombed, shot at, traumatized, holding people's innards, trying to stuff intestines back into somebody's body cavity as you wait for the chopper to airlift them. The idea that you would compare cuddling and playing with babies, toddlers, and children... To watching friends with half a face die in your arms takes a kind of sickness that's hard to even comprehend. Women make their sacrifices, they get pregnant. Anyway. All right, thank you for your patience. Please push back against this propaganda and call out the people who are complaining about parenthood. Call them out. Say no. If you're not enjoying parenting, that's on you.
[0:42:03] You're like a sour person at a theme park.
[0:42:07] I was you were talking about modernity earlier and I totally agree with you, especially on the feminism point but with me specifically I don't know how close you are to this but I remember dial up growing up as a kid and sitting in front of the computer waiting 45 minutes for internet connection.
[0:42:28] Oh yeah the don't pick up the phone I'm on the line I'm downloading.
[0:42:32] Right yeah Yeah, it was, I wouldn't want to go back to the 90s for anything, so I imagine the Middle Ages was very difficult, people dying all the time, childbirth and all that.
[0:42:49] Yeah, it was a sort of vicious cycle that happened throughout a lot of the ancient world, in particular, in the Dark Ages and in the time of plague, which came in successive waves in the early part of the Middle Ages. And what happened was life was so horrifying that people lived for the afterlife.
[0:43:11] And because they lived for the afterlife, they didn't work that much in investing to make things better. It's kind of a vicious cycle that took down a lot of human history. Life was so appalling. Life was so painful, so difficult, so unpleasant, so, I mean, itchy. I mean, you'd have to kiss women who'd never brushed their teeth. And it's not like they didn't know about honey. So it wasn't like, well, no sugar, so no tooth decay. And you would have to make love to a woman who hadn't bathed in six months. I mean, life was pretty unpleasant. So the idea that comes out of a lot of Christianity, that the body is hell, that that it's run by Satan, that the flesh is weak and corrupt and bad and wrong. It's like, well, yeah, you had constant pustules and infections and toothaches, and your body was like a torture chamber. And so you yearned for release. You learned for the half kiss of easeful death. And because you yearned for release and life was so unpleasant, you didn't invest too much in making it better. Life was like a flop house that you were just staying in for a couple of nights. You don't work to improve it. You don't paint it. You don't fix out the furniture. You don't fix the windows. You're just like any more than you change the oil in the car you've rented. So life was short, difficult, ugly, unpleasant. And so people lived for the other world, the higher world, the after world, and did not invest in improving things in the here and now. And life just had to get a little bit better in order for people to recognize that they were going to stay in the flop house and they could fix it. And then they started to, but that was sort of the beginning of the Enlightenment. So is there anything else you wanted to mention?
[0:44:41] Just with music, music was the same thing for me as well. I mean, we used to have iPods and CD players, and then the technocrats got wise and finally just said, we're just going to put everything on a phone. Yeah.
[0:44:58] All right. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you very much. And I guess you can go back to your errands. Vanilla. Vanilla. Vanilla. If you would like to unmute.
[0:45:09] Hello.
[0:45:10] Yes, hello.
[0:45:11] I'm not sure what happened there. Did the other guy get disconnected?
[0:45:15] No, he just didn't have a huge amount to say, so I thought I would move on to you.
[0:45:19] Oh, all right. Would you mind if I just play devil's advocate regarding the work of women? Yeah.
[0:45:27] Please do.
[0:45:28] All right. So what I want to say is women in general don't just do domestic work anymore. And many women also have a nine to five.
[0:45:41] Go on. I mean, yes, I'm aware, but so go on with your point.
[0:45:45] So I don't think it is quite appropriate to compare them to earlier times where they only did domestic work.
[0:45:54] Okay. I understand that a lot of women have jobs. I was talking about the women who were staying home, complaining about motherhood, but I'm certainly happy to talk about women who have jobs if you want.
[0:46:08] All right. We can do that. Okay.
[0:46:10] So what country are you from?
[0:46:13] I'm from South Africa.
[0:46:15] Okay.
[0:46:15] I've actually talked before.
[0:46:17] Yes. No, I know. I just couldn't. I mean, I didn't want to guess from the accent. And do you still live there? Okay. All right. So, what percentage of the average woman's wages goes towards child care? Let's say if she has two children, what percentage of her wages is going towards child care?
[0:46:41] I have no idea. I can't believe that.
[0:46:43] No, I mean, there's no way you would know that. And I've actually done these calculations for some books. And it depends on the place. And there's a variety of different factors. It depends on the woman's income. If she's a brain surgeon, that's different, and if she's a waitress. But in general, most of women's money that they make in the workforce goes towards child care and the costs of working. So if a woman makes $4,000 a month, that's close to $50,000 a year, that's a decent income, but she pays a lot of it in taxes, so she gets much less in take-home pay. And let's say that she is only taxed at, I don't know, 25% or whatever. So she's taking home $3,000.
[0:47:28] And then she has to pay for, they usually have to have a second car because they're both commuting and that's expensive. She has to have work outfits. They need dry cleaning. She has to get beauty and hair products and she has to get stockings and all of the kind of stuff she has for being a woman in the workforce. And then they have to pay for, you know, maintenance and gas and insurance and and all of that on the second car.
[0:47:55] And she often will buy lunches out. And so that's an additional expense. And so of the $3,000, a lot of it gets consumed by the costs of having a job. And so it gets a little bit closer to $2,000. And then for a lot of women, having two kids in child care is about $2,000. Could be $1,500, could be $2,000. But in terms of the actual profit that she's making from working, it's very little. It's usually not more than a few dollars an hour. And so the question is, particularly when the children are young, so if a woman has two children, let's say spaced two years apart, she should at least take them to the age of six. Because, they'll often start school at the age of five, but you don't just want to have your kids go to school and then immediately go to work because who's going to take care of your kids after school? School ends at 3.30. You're often not getting home till six o'clock if you work till five and have an hour commute. And also, you don't want to just dump your kids straight into after-school care programs and so on because they're adjusting to school and you need to talk them through it and ask them what's going on if they're being bullied. You need to stay close to your kids when they go through a big transition, like going from, say, daycare to school.
[0:49:16] So if a woman is going to have two children, two years apart, and take a, them to at least the age of six. I mean, seven would be better. That's sort of the age of reason in most religions, but let's just say six. I don't want to stuff the case or tip the balance.
[0:49:32] So she has the first kid, takes him to six, the second kid two years later. So she's eight years out of the workforce. Now, if she's in the workforce, most of her money is going towards childcare and she isn't actually making that much money at all. The other thing, of course, she also has to look at is that women spend a lot of money on the home. I'm not complaining about this. It's just a fact. If you go to the mall, most of the stores, in fact, almost all the stores are dedicated to women. I kind of knew this in a way, but having a wife and a daughter has given me a whole different view of the economy because women spend, like women control 85 to 90% of household spending.
[0:50:17] And, you know, women spend a lot. And I'm not complaining about that. I'm just saying that it is an optional expense that a lot of women have. You don't need the new fluffy towels. You don't need particular kinds of soaps. You don't need decorative pillows in terms of things that you actually need. So I would say that for women who work, again, on average, on the mean, most of their money goes towards childcare and the rest of their money goes towards fairly frivolous things that aren't actually needed in the home. But, you know, make it nice, but they're not nice to have, not have to have. That was my big division in the business world. You know, it's nice to have extra money for R&D. It's a have to have to meet payroll, right? So nice to have versus have to have, you kind of got to differentiate these things in life. So when women say, yes, but I'm working, I'm like, yeah, but not really.
[0:51:13] Because for the most part, your money is just going to daycare workers and your money is going to after- care programs your money is going to a variety of things that aren't actually building that much wealth it just feels like you're building wealth because you look at four thousand dollars a month and you say well you know boy if if if i didn't work we'd have fifty thousand dollars less a year and it's like no but you gotta you gotta do the actual math and you've gotta figure out what is your actual take-home pay and it's usually only a couple of bucks an hour so and you're losing out on all that time with your children and you're stressed and you're busy and you've got all this complications. So again, there's exceptions, but the exceptions go both ways. We're just talking about the average. And so, yeah, I'm happy to get your thoughts on that, but that's what I...
[0:52:04] Would you say there are more merit to their complaints if they also have to work?
[0:52:09] I'm sorry, say again?
[0:52:11] Do you think there is more merit to their complaints if they also work a full job?
[0:52:16] I'm sorry, did you not hear what I said? um because you're just repeating like you you asked me a question i gave you a fairly long and sophisticated answer and now you're just saying but don't i still get to complain if they have a job i'm like don't take the job stay home with your kids okay and if they stay home with their children their husband ends up earning more because the household is taken care of so the man can concentrate on his career. So it's a split focus, right? So if you have a band with, a bassist, a singer, a drummer, and a guitarist, and the singer is the best singer, and the bassist says, well, I want half the time up at the microphone, even though he's not a good singer, the band suffers because they're not efficiently dividing the labor. And so a man's career generally takes off.
[0:53:09] If his wife is home, raising his kids, supporting him, making sure the household runs well, taking away the paperwork from him. So he can focus on travel. He can focus on business opportunities. He can focus on staying late if he has to. So his income is going to go up considerably if his wife stays home. One of the reasons why women in the workforce tend to promote other women being in the workforce is that women in the workforce cannot compete with men whose wives stay home and run the household and raise the kids, because the men who have that have so much extra focus and the liberation of their testosterone-based energy for resource creation and acquisition that the women can't compete. So it's simple math, and I'm not calling you simple. I'm just saying it's simple math to say, well, if the woman doesn't work, then the household is down four grand a month. It's much more detailed than that. And once you actually run the numbers.
[0:54:06] And you know just generally why would you want to trade a paycheck for time with your kids but especially when they're young first five years are absolutely crucial for children's development like, what do you care about some maybe even if you do end up with some extra money in the bank or you end up with some more knickknacks around the house or you end up with a nicer car I mean that stuff all gets thrown out and trashed and garbaged and binned and boxed and squished into stupid little cubes like the time with your children is is truly precious and the time with your children, also roots your old age because if you dump your kids in daycare and you go off to chase, powerpoint dollars then when you get old and you want to spend time with your children you don't have the bond and you they don't have the quote sacrifice as the basis of the relationship so this is why people move away from their parents and they don't have the parents available to help raise their grandchildren. I mean, if you are a woman and you are raising your kids, then you really want relatives around, particularly grandparents who have experience. That's really great. And you can have all of that wonderful stuff.
[0:55:14] But in order to have that, you just have to take some years off work to raise your kids and you get all of these massive benefits down the road because all the money that you spend, sorry, all the money that you create by working rather than spending time with your kids, you end up spending later on in life on healthcare workers and other care workers and Ubers to drive you around to your medical appointments and all of that. You just end up burning up all that money because you generally don't have access to those kinds of bonds with your kids where they will help you out with that kind of stuff and want to and and care about it so it's just it's a bad deal economically as a whole but it's tough to make that case if that makes sense.
[0:55:54] No i think i understand what you're saying um uh there's actually a law proposal here where they're gonna make it uh compulsory for uh kids to go to well I guess to preschool at the age of four.
[0:56:09] Sorry, you too. Yeah, go ahead. I'm listening. I'm just, I'm not sure when your sentences end, so go ahead.
[0:56:15] Okay, I'm sorry. So, what I said is there's a proposal here for, basically for four-year-olds to have to start going to school. It's compulsory. What do you think of that?
[0:56:31] I mean, that's just evil. It's absolutely evil. That is using the guns of the state to rip toddlers from the arms of their mothers and march them out to these dehumanizing institutions of government-run daycare hell. It's absolutely evil. It's beyond stone evil. It is in many ways worse than child labor because at least children who work get paid. They tend to be older and there's some economics to it. But this, yeah, basically marching into people's households with weaponry, which is effectively what all laws do. All laws are based on force. They are enforced, right? Force is kind of like fiat by command, fiat currency. So yeah, ascending... Armed state agents into households to rip toddlers out of the arms of their mothers is evil almost beyond words.
[0:57:24] So what the defenders of this would say is that if the children don't go to daycare, they're not ready to go to big school. I'm using that in end up in quotation marks, but what do you think of that?
[0:57:39] I find all aspects of coercive government involvement in the raising of children to be morally repulsive and evil almost beyond words. It's one of the greatest evils. You know, I have to not dwell upon the 13 fucking years that I was trapped in government education. I have to not dwell on that because if I dwell on that, I am filled with near bottomless rage. I mean, I love learning. I love thinking. I love reasoning. I love debating. I love advancing knowledge. And the fact that I was trapped in these shitholes, these shithole government schools with these incompetent, brain-dead teachers and this retarded curriculum, and that I was forced to do pointless, dig-a-hole-and-fill-it-intellectual bullshit busywork for 13 years straight.
[0:58:31] And before that I was in daycares but at least I was allowed to play and draw and and so on in daycares and play with friends and at least that was something but the school stuff was absolutely appalling I especially like now I sort of look forward in my life and I've got you know maybe 20 30 years to go because I'm in my late 50s with luck right with luck but, And so each year becomes more precious to me. And I think about the hellscape. And I was in school, I was in private school, I was in public school in a variety of different countries. So I've had some experience in a variety of different educational systems. Absolutely terrible.
[0:59:12] Absolutely appalling. It is a flamethrower to the curious mind. Do you know that government schools are foundational to suicides? In other words, children commit suicide at a far lower rate, far lower rate in the summers when they're not trapped in these bullying, brain-dead hellholes. So schools are driving children in not tiny numbers to psych meds, to being drugged just to get through the day. You know, that's what they did to assassins. That's why it's called hashish, hashashins. They would get their murderers high on drugs in order to get them to kill. Women take drugs to get through prostitution and other forms of often coerced sex work. And children find school so hellish they have to be drugged by the tens of millions in order to get through the day. That's how fucking appalling government education is. So yeah, I have no doubt that governments want to inflict this hell on children earlier to get them more acclimatized to it, but that's not a justification at all. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:00:25] Yes, I've been meaning to ask, have you ever developed an alternative theory of education?
[1:00:32] I've been reading through your peaceful parenting book recently. Maybe you mentioned something about it in there, but I probably haven't gotten to it if it indeed exists, so I'm asking it here just in case. Okay.
[1:00:47] Sorry, asking me what?
[1:00:49] If you've ever developed a theory of education.
[1:00:53] Well, my theory of education is let's get the guns out of it. Let's get the violence out of it. Let's get the coercion out of it. Let's get the government-enforced teachers' unions, the government-enforced payment to the school systems that often come from property taxes, the government-enforced curriculum. I don't have a solution to anything in the world other than let's stop using violence oh let's stop at least initiating violence self-defense is fine blah blah blah usual caveats, but my solution it's like if you have an economy based on slavery which we kind of do it's just a soft slavery through tax and debt if you have an economy based on slavery and i say well let's get rid of slavery and you say well what's your solution to things it's like i i don't i don't have a solution other than slavery is wrong slavery is evil slavery is immoral we should not be initiating the use of force to transfer property. We should not be herding children around at gunpoint, and we should not be forcing parents to pay for indoctrination, often against their own culture and history, in government schools. We should not be using force and violence and debt and money printing and counterfeiting and enslavement to educate children, because it's not education, it's just pure indoctrination. So as far as the theory of education goes, I don't really care. I do care that guns are pointed at parents and children to enforce the current mind-shredding bullshit.
[1:02:19] I don't care what happens when people stop pointing guns at each other. It's like if everyone's forced to get married to each other by the government, and they say, well, what's your theory about how people should get married? It's like, I don't have a theory about how people should get married. I just know that they shouldn't be forced to be married to each other. And whatever they choose, free of that force is totally fine with me. And however children get educated, free of force is totally fine with me. I'm a moral philosopher, which means I oppose violations of the non-aggression principle as evil. What people do in a state of freedom is their choice. As long as they're not initiating the use of force against each other, I could not care less.
[1:02:58] Do you think children should be able to choose their own topics that they are interested in and then pursue them?
[1:03:08] Well, that's a big question. When you say children, are you talking about two-year-olds or 17-year-olds?
[1:03:16] That's a good question. Let's start with, let's say, first grade.
[1:03:24] Well, I think, I can just talk about my own personal experience here because, you know, what works for me might not work for everyone. So the one thing my daughter did have to do when she was younger, when she was very little, was I did teach her how to read.
[1:03:40] And she didn't mind it sometimes at sometimes she frustrated and so on but i was pretty clear that this had to happen she had to learn how to read and i also know this is because there's a time when kids are little when their language acquisition is crazy fast and it's a developmental window that if you miss it they will sometimes end up with reading comprehension and language issues for the rest of their lives and so i was very keen on having my daughter learn how to read and it didn't take very long. I remember the first time she recognized the word up. It was very exciting. We were both thrilled about it. And she still remembers it to this day. She was very tiny.
[1:04:17] And so I was very keen and pretty insistent that she did have to learn how to read. And I tried to make it as much fun as possible. There were times when she was frustrated, but you know, it's nothing wrong with kids being frustrated as long as you help them through it in a positive way. And she became a huge reader and she has read hundreds and hundreds of books and has had great pleasure out of reading. So she doesn't look back and say, oh, I can't believe you made me. And of course, I didn't use force or punishment or anything like that. I was just pretty insistent that it's very important. And so there's nothing wrong with, in a sense, making your children do stuff as long as they thank you later, right? Like, I mean, when your kids are little, they want to eat a whole bunch of candy.
[1:05:00] Of course, right? I mean, I'm 59 and I want to eat a whole bunch of candy. Every time I go past a candy store, I have to make myself keep walking because if I buy it, I'm probably going to snack on it.
[1:05:10] So if your children thank you later, then there's nothing wrong with that, right? So if you let your kids eat a whole bunch of candy or not learn anything, I mean, maybe they'll be happier in the moment when they're young, but then what they'll do is they'll look back on you when they're older. Let's say you let them eat all this sugar and garbage.
[1:05:31] Then they are overweight, they can't do any sports, they have bad skin, they're unattractive to the opposite sex, their self-esteem is in the toilet, they've got health issues, you know, maybe they've got onset diabetes or maybe even full-blown diabetes. And what they do is if they're 17 or 16 and they're obese and have health issues and can't wash themselves properly and have bad teeth, they'll look back and they'll say, I really wish you had not let me eat all that sugar. Because now I have lifelong fat cells. Like once fat cells develop, they're almost impossible to get rid of, because the Supreme Court, hang on, the Supreme Court intervenes and says they can't leave. So if your children, if you encourage your children in a particular direction, for good reasons, and even though they kick and fuss at times, if they look back and say, it was a good thing you taught me how to read at the right time, so it was easiest for me, then that's fine. And And if you children cry because they can't have candy, but then when they're in their teens, they say, I'm glad that I have a healthy body. I thank you for not letting me eat all the candy I wanted. That's fine. You can get permission after the fact. And that's totally fine.
[1:06:43] If I have a little boat down at the marina and somebody's drowning and somebody grabs my boat and uses it, they don't have permission for me ahead of time. And if somebody would say, hey, man, someone's taking your boat, I'd be like, oh, no, make them stop taking it. but then if they use it to save their child from drowning and then return my boat, I'd be like, oh yeah, you have permission. I'm very glad you did that. I'm very glad you didn't let your child drown. So permission after the fact is totally fine. It's not a violation of any kind of property rights or anything like that. So as far as you should teach your children how to read, hang on, you should teach your children how to read, and then you should try to facilitate that which they enjoy the most. And so you keep wanting to say stuff. I keep trying to answer the question. You keep interrupting me, so go ahead.
[1:07:27] Okay, I'm sorry. I just wanted to say that I've had many people say that they are thankful that their parents, well, not even just their parents, but also their teachers spanked them because it made them better.
[1:07:40] Sure. And that's still immoral, but it wouldn't be something that would ever be pursued legally. I mean, there are some people who pay to get beaten by dominatrixes, right? The sadomasochistic domination, submission, BDSM, and sort of this sort of stuff. I don't think that's healthy, but it's obviously not a crime if it's consensual. So, yeah, I mean, that can happen. I still disagree with the morality of it, but it doesn't really matter what I agree or disagree with because nothing would happen legally with somebody who has approved of the behavior. So, go ahead.
[1:08:19] Okay, I'm going to have to go now. because my phone is about to die. But thanks for the conversation.
[1:08:27] You are very welcome. I appreciate that. And thank you for calling in. So, yeah, with regards to, and I'm happy to take more callers if you have any questions or comments, with regards to letting children pursue their own interests, my daughter is, as was the case with me, is more interested in language than math. However, it's important to have a basic grasp of mathematics in life. I mean, you need to calculate percentages, you need to do a budget, you need to do your taxes, you need to have some understanding of numbers. And the idea that, well, you can just.
[1:09:11] Push a calculator. Everyone carries a calculator around, of course, in their pockets these days. Well, but you need to also understand what the calculator is doing so that you can look at the results and know if you fat-fingered something, right? If you meant to do 900 times 10, but you did 900 times 100, you need to look at that and say, well, that's not quite right. So you do need to understand, in general, some basic principles of mathematics and numbers and ratios and percentages and all of that. Now, do you need to do long division by hand? No. No, you really don't. So do you need to do, I remember struggling to learn algebraic division when I was in my early teens and I had a tutor who helped me. That was actually my brother. He did help me and I did manage to get through the test and then I promptly forgot about it all and you couldn't pay me to do it and have me achieve it. So in general, what your job is as a parent is to prepare your children for adulthood. To prepare your children for adulthood. Now, does adulthood require that you do math from time to time? Of course it does. You have to figure out debt payments. You have to figure out mortgages. You have to figure out taxes. As I said, you have to do some budgeting. You have to understand some math to be a functional adult.
[1:10:33] You have to understand dosage in medicine. If you're taking antibiotics, you have to, if you're reordering, I don't know, let's say you take coenzymes or whatever it is, or some, vitamins or supplements, you need to understand milligrams and larger and smaller numbers and so on, right? So yeah, you need to understand some basic math in order to get through life. So if you raise your children and let's say they don't like math at all and they love language and all they want to do is language and they hate math, well, when they become adults, will they wish that they knew a bit of math? Of course they will. And will they complain if you didn't teach them any math because they just didn't feel like it or didn't want to in the moment? Yeah, they will, and rightly so, because your job as a parent is to prepare your children for adulthood, and adulthood involves math. And is it important to teach your children grammar? Yes, it is. Yes, it is, because they're going to be judged by the written form. And it's kind of funny because when I was a kid, the written form was dying because it was telephones or in-person. Everybody was verbal. Everybody was verbal. Nobody wrote letters, really. And everything was either on the telephone or in-person, and nobody really wrote. I mean, you'd write some notes here and there. But with emails, with texting, with blogs, with all of this sort of stuff, writing has come back into vogue.
[1:12:02] And if you don't know how to write, you are at a severe disadvantage in what is often a text-based world. And so, let's say you're some guy and you're texting some girl that you like, and you say, I hope you're having a good day, and you say Y-O-U-R rather than Y-O-U apostrophe R-E, which is the contraction for U-R, of course. And let's say that she's literate, you're going to look like an idiot. Even if you're not an idiot, you're going to look like an idiot, and she's going to judge you by your grammar. If you're applying for a job and you misspell things and you get the grammar wrong, they're going to just throw out your resume or your letter. They're not going to take you seriously.
[1:12:45] If you want to influence people online, but you make basic spelling and grammar errors, people aren't going to listen to the sophistication of your argument. So yes, even though grammar is not super exciting, to put it mildly, you know, when do you put the apostrophe at the end of others? Is it others no apostrophe, others apostrophe S, or others S apostrophe? Well, you kind of got to know these things. And of course, you can run them through AI and so on. I get all of that, but it's more efficient to just know it yourself. And you won't always have that opportunity. And of course, nobody knew that some perfect grammar checker was coming along, or it's not perfect, but an easier grammar checker. So yeah, you've got to teach your kids grammar, because in order to be effective as an adult, you need to be able to write in a way that is easiest to understand. The purpose of grammar is to make your thoughts easier to understand.
[1:13:44] Right? Eats, shoots, and leaves is the name of a grammar book. Like, panda bears eat shoots and leaves. Eats, shoots, and leaves. If you put the comma in between eats and shoots, then it's a guy who goes to a restaurant, blows everyone away, and then runs away. Eats, shoots, and leaves. Eats, shoots, and leaves means he's snacking on some vegetation. A salad. So, it's important. I comma can change the entire meaning of a sentence.
[1:14:18] And grammatical errors can be quite hilarious, but they're confusing. And grammatical errors take other people's time.
[1:14:25] You're kind of stealing time if you write in a grammatically incorrect way because grammar is there to make your thoughts more efficient and more comprehensible. I mean, I'm sure everyone has received a message or an email which you can't really make head or tail of because the grammar is contradictory or confusing. And so if you don't use good grammar, you are putting the burden of comprehension unjustly and unfairly on other people.
[1:14:49] They've got to email you back and say, what do you mean by this? I don't understand. And then you've got to email them back and right you're just taking their time and it's kind of annoying to deal with as a whole because again especially as i get older you know there was a time in the middle of my life when i didn't really care about efficiency in time that much but now i'm getting older you know i'll be 60 in september so the end of the tunnel is well within sight and therefore time and efficiency has become, all the more essential all right thank you everybody so much for your time please please please, please, please help out the show. Freedomain.com/donate. Of course, we're still trying to recover from the brutal deplatforming of half a decade ago. Of course, income has not come anywhere close to what it was before. If you could help out the show, I would really appreciate it. Freedomain.com/donate. Peacefulparenting.com, shop.freedomain.com and freedomain.com/books. Have yourself a beautiful day, everyone. Love you guys. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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